I can’t decide whether or not Michelangelo would roll over in his grave or jump for joy if he saw this app. Then again, Michelangelo would probably faint from seeing a light bulb, so who knows how he’d react to tablet applications.
In any case, the Sculpt 123D iPad app from Autodesk looks like a really cool way get your hands dirty with an art form that the majority of us have no… → Read More
While Mike Tassey and Rich Perkins were showing off their impressive GSM and WiFi-hacking drone, it seems that other mobile networks may have been under a silent siege. Word over on the Full Disclosure mailing list is that CDMA and 4G networks were locally compromised, allowing for a full-on man-in-the middle attack to take place. → Read More
Internet chat is older than the web, but it still remains one of the best ways to keep people engaged with a site. And for good reason: people like talking to each other. Or at least, they like to share their opinions with the knowledge that someone, somewhere is reading them.
Now Y Combinator-backed startup Envolve is making it even easier to integrate chat boxes into your site by launching… → Read More
I remember when I first wrote about Foodspotting a year and a half ago. At the time, nearly everyone I knew was using various social networks to share pictures of their food. Foodspotting was a service built around that very idea. That alone may have been enough, but the broader goal behind the photo-sharing was always food discovery.
Today, the service has hit one million downloads of their… → Read More
If you’re like me you’ve thought about digging up old 8mm film, or VHS tapes, and converting them to a more modern format. There are a lot of services that fulfill this need – just do a search for “media conversion” or something similar and you’ll see dozens of services. Most of the sites don’t inspire much confidence in sending them priceless childhood videos, though. And generally they focus on… → Read More
Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 owners? Your keyboard case has finally arrived. The Logitech Keyboard Case for Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is a long product name for what is popularly called a Zagg Case. Let’s not get caught up in the manufacturing design details, but this keyboard case carries a Logitech badge and per the product page, is a Zagg product. The branding is just like Logitech’s iPad 2 keyboard… → Read More
Satirical, bizarre and amusing news website Fark has kicked the fark out of a patent troll called Gooseberry Natural Resources LLC. The original lawsuit was leveraged in January, claiming Fark infringed on a patent that covered a “method of inputing news releases into a web form, which would then compile the news release and email it to media outlets.”
The patent, for those who know Fark, has… → Read More
The Internet (namely the corner populated by some dude with a coffee blog) is a place where no good deed goes unpunished. A few days ago, Jonathan Stark posted his Starbucks card online asking people to buy coffee and then recharge the card when it was falling low. The result? Lots of good will, lots of people with free coffee, and my day was improved immensely by being able to write about… → Read More
Facebook has taken command of many of the basic elements of social interactions including email, chat, and even mobile messaging, but one area where the social network has not yet innovated is the calendar. While you can create events and be notified of these events, Facebook doesn’t offer a Gmail calendar-like feature. Plango is hoping to fill this gap with the launch of its iOS, and web-based… → Read More
Klout, a startup that measures influence on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and most recently Foursquare, is adding more services today, totaling 10 different ways to measure your social influence on the web. Klout is adding five new networks—Blogger, Tumblr, Flickr, Instagram and Last.fm, allowing Klout users to add their influence on these networks to their Klout score.
For… → Read More
T-Mobile customers have gotten quite a bit of mileage of out their No Overage data plans: while everyone’s careful not to use the word “unlimited”, T-Mobile’s approach still let users gobble up as much data as they wanted so long as they didn’t mind a (pretty drastic) speed decrease.
At 200 MB and 2 GB, T-Mobile’s smartphone data tiers look familiar, but the No Overage gimmick gives customers… → Read More
Social commerce network Lockerz is opening its up the site to non-members. As you may know, Kleiner Perkins-backed Lockerz, which just raised another $36 million from Live Nation, Dag Ventures, Kleiner, and Liberty Media; revolves around the idea that influencers within a social network can become brand and content advocates and affect the behavior of their friends.
Lockerz is primarily… → Read More
So remember that one time when RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis kind of freaked out during a BBC interview. The fact that he flaked on the interview kind of overshadowed the reasons why he started freaking out in the first place — India. The Indian government has been tightening its control over social media and other forms of communication within the country amidst the rising threat of terrorism… → Read More
If you’ve got $30 burning a hole in your pocket you can be the proud owner of a brand new HiPhone 5, a knock-off iPhone 5 modelled – we presume – on the leaked pictures of the iPhone 5. The phone, which features Wi-Fi, a micro SD slot, and a GSM cellular radio, is standard Shanzai material. It also requires a stylus to use the touchscreen and call quality, according to a buyer, is pretty bad. → Read More
Smartphone maker HTC has committed to launching its first NFC phone, the HTC Stunning, which will debut in China sometime later this year. The phone will be an 4-inch, Android-based device, and will support bank card network China UnionPay’s mobile payment standard.
This will enable the phone to perform mobile payments at point-of-sale, using the contactless technology known as NFC, or “near… → Read More
Exclusive – KidZui, a San Diego, California-based startup that offers a Web browser for kids, has debuted its latest product, a website called ZUI.com that allows kids to search and explore more than 5 million parent-approved websites, YouTube videos, games, images and whatnot.
In addition, the fledgling company has announced that it has secured an additional $2 million in funding from VC firms… → Read More
Cross-platform newsreader application News360 launched into version 2.0 today, a significant update that introduces its new personalization features. The news reader now learns from your activity on social Web services, including Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader and Evernote, in order to present you with stories that fit your interests.
But unlike some of its competitors, which there are now… → Read More
Back in April when it was just a bunch of harsh words and vicious threats, the beef between Samsung and Apple was pretty entertaining. But things are only funny until someone gets hurt, and this time (for the first time throughout this war) it’s Europe that will feel the pain.
In its never-ending tiff with the South Korea-based Samsung, Apple won a temporary injunction to block sales of the… → Read More
Well, not really, but Thinkmodo has put out a new video showing some behind the scenes footage of how they, in partnership with Clockwork Apple, created the iPad Head Girl hat, um…head piece. The thing actually looks pretty solid, although I would not go as far as to say that it looks comfortable.
You likely saw the iPad Head Girl video making rounds in the media last week. Conceived by… → Read More
The Korean Institue of Industrial Technology’s SEROPI project has already produced one imposing-looking robot, SEROPI-1, and now they’ve announced the completion of SEROPI-2, an oddly Johnny-5-looking robo personality that is shown here interacting with children and actors on a stage. → Read More
While tech company IPOs have captured buzz of late, it looks like M&A activity in the sector has been booming. According to an Ernst & Young report, big deals drove the aggregate value of global technology M&A to $52.1 billion in the second quarter of 2011, nearly doubling the deal value from the first quarter (up 92 percent to be exact).
Ernst & Young said that the surge was… → Read More
NoSQL database company Couchbase, created earlier this year through the merger of CouchOne (co-founded by the creator of CouchDB) and Membase (founded by the key developers behind memcached), has scored $14 million in a Series C round of funding led by Ignition Partners with participation from the company’s existing backers Accel Partners, Mayfield Fund, and North Bridge Venture Partners. In… → Read More
Augmented Reality veterans Metaio are announcing some more details about their upcoming insideAR conference scheduled to take place in Munich, Germany on September 26 – 27. While the speaker list for the event has been available since July, the greater theme for the conference is being updated via press release today. That theme is: “From a Vision to a Roadmap”.
To help illustrate this… → Read More
Tech Accelerator DreamIt Ventures is holding its Demo Day for its New York class of startups today. The 15 companies include students and alumni from top academic institutions like Harvard Business School, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Yale University and Carnegie Mellon University. Several of the founders also have past work experience at companies including Yahoo… → Read More
Tencent, a major provider of Internet and mobile services in China, has reported second quarter earnings today, and unfortunately fell short of analyst expectations. Revenue came in at $1 billion, an increase of 44.3% from the second quarter of 2010.
Profit for the period was 2.35 Yuan (Around $362.1 million), which is an increase of 21.3% year over year. Analysts expected 2.54 billion Yuan in… → Read More
Meet the red 3DS. It’s a lot like the standard blue and black model, but, you know, red. The Flame Red color flavor debuted in Japan a while ago, but Nintendo is finally bringing it here as part of the system’s relaunch this Friday. (As if the color red will help the 3DS)
The 3DS hasn’t exactly been a hit so far. The company took a big loss last quarter after sales came in well below… → Read More
Sony announced WhiteMagic today, a “next-generation”, 3-inch TFT LCD screen that boasts 1.23M-dot full VGA resolution. What’s special about the display is that it has two distinct modes: if switched to “low power mode”, power consumption of the backlight is pushed down by over 50% to 125mW, with Sony saying brightness in this mode is still comparable to that of conventional LCDs. → Read More
Many have been wondering how Google +1 is going to effect SEO and search results. As you may know, Google launched +1 as a “like” or “retweet” button and is a way to share Google Search results that you like with your friends and the broader web. SEO management company Conductor says that +1 does have meaningful impact on search results. And because of this, the startup is now pulling… → Read More
Daily deals juggernaut Groupon managed to significantly slash marketing costs last quarter, but its net loss in the second quarter of this year has more than doubled compared to last year as it hired more than 1,000 new employees, according to an SEC filing published this morning. The company is still growing like gangbusters but losing money like crazy in the process.
The updated financial… → Read More
Walmart’s Vudu movie streaming service is ready to pipe movies directly to your iPad. But don’t look for the traditional iOS app. There isn’t one. Vudu is streaming movies over a web app, which doesn’t force Walmart to share revenue with Apple.
Vudu is skirting Apple’s new terms of service that requires sharing revenue. Much like Amazon’s new Kindle Cloud Reader, Vudu can offer all the… → Read More
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